Introduction Thinking Fascism and Populism in Terms of the Past

Introduction Thinking Fascism and Populism in Terms of the Past Representing a historian’s inquiry into how and why fascism morphed into populism in history, this book describes the dictatorial genealogies of modern populism. It also stresses the signifi cant diff erences between populism as a form of democracy and fascism as a form of dictatorship. It rethinks the conceptual and historical experiences of fascism and populism by assessing their elective ideological affi nities and substantial political dif- ferences in history and theory. A historical approach means not subordinating lived experiences to models or ideal types but rather stressing how the actors saw themselves in contexts that were both national and transnational. It means stressing varied contingencies and manifold sources. History combines evidence with interpretation. Ideal types ignore chronology and the cen- trality of historical processes. Historical knowledge requires accounting for how the past is experienced and explained through narratives of continuities and change over time. Against an idea of populism as an exclusively European or American phenomenon, I propose a global reading of its historical 1 2 / Introduction itineraries. Disputing generic theoretical defi nitions that reduce populism to a single sentence, I stress the need to return populism to history. Distinctive, and even opposed, forms of left- and right- wing populism crisscross the world, and I agree with historians like Eric Hobsbawm that left and right forms of populism cannot be confl ated simply because they are often antithetical.1 While populists on the left present those who are opposed to their political views as enemies of the people, populists on the right connect this populist intolerance of alternative political views with a con- ception of the people formed on the basis of ethnicity and country of origin. In short, right-wing populists are xenophobic. Emphasizing the populist style rather than its contents, most historians have rejected the most generic, transhistorical dimen- sions of the many theories of populism that minimize historical and ideological diff erences. By questioning defi nitions of populism as either exclusively left or right, I stress how populism has historically presented a range of possibilities, from Hugo Chávez to Donald Trump, maintaining essential social and political distinctions between left and right but without losing its key illiberal attributes in its varied historical manifestations. And against the commonplace idea of populism as a new political experience without a deep history—namely, a new forma- tion that was born out of the turn-of-the-century fall of Com- munism—put forward a historical analysis of populism as equally rooted in the three other global moments of the past century: the two world wars and the Cold War.2 From the European right to the United States, populism, xenophobia, racism, narcissistic leaders, nationalism, and antipolitics occupy the center of politics. Should we brace our- selves for an ideological storm similar to the one fascism pre- cipitated when it fi rst appeared a little less than one hundred Introduction / 3 years ago? Some actors and analysts of world politics believe so, and the recent surge of racist populist politics in the United States, Austria, France, Germany, and many other places around the globe seems to confi rm it. But few agree on what fascism and populism actually are, and scholars of fascism and populism have often been reticent about entering the public discussion about the uses of the terms. By absenting themselves from public debates, they have left the uses of fascism and populism basi- cally devoid of historical interpretation. Whereas fascism and populism seem to be all over the place, many current actors and interpreters are not aware of their actual histories. the uses of fascism and populism Fascism, like populism, is often used to denote absolute evil, bad government, authoritarian leadership, and racism. These uses of the terms take away their historical meanings. The problematic belief that history merely repeats itself has traveled the Global North and the Global South, from Moscow to Washington, and from Ankara to Caracas. After the Russian annexation of Cri- mea in 2014, and the connected Ukrainian crisis, Russian offi - cials referred to the government in Ukraine as the outcome of a fascist coup. Hillary Clinton, secretary of state at the time, described Russian president Vladimir Putin’s actions with respect to Ukraine as something like “what Hitler did back in the ’30s.” Far from the Black Sea, the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, that same year used the threat of fascism to justify his imprisonment of an opposition leader. The same problematic claims were, and are, made by those opposed to Latin American experiments with populism. Similar epithets are commonly used for the Middle East and Africa. In 2017, 4 / Introduction Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described Europe as “fascist and cruel.” Almost identical characterizations of both government and opposition as fascist crisscross the Global South and North from Argentina to the United States, where Donald Trump faced this very serious accusation during his successful 2015–16 presidential campaign and where he himself as President-elect accused intelligence agencies of having engaged in Nazi practices against him. Trump symptomatically asked, “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”3 Like the term fascism, the term populism has been abused equally as a condensation of extremes from right to left. It has been infl ated or confl ated with anything that stands against liberal democracy. For example, politicians like Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto or the former British prime minister Tony Blair (notably, after the British “Brexit” of 2016) charged that populism was standing against the neoliberal status quo that they so passionately represented. In fact, this tendency to paint populism as an unproblematized negative take on democracy reveals a simplistic, and often self-serving, identifi cation of democracy with neoliberalism. These positions replicate the us versus them totalizing views of populism. Moreover, these views void democracy of any emancipatory potential. In this context, when confronted with its neoliberal enemies, sectors of society (from right to left) that feel they have been left aside by techno- cratic elites fi nd populism even more appealing. Populism and neoliberalism can be seen as equally undermining democratic diversity and equality, but neither is a form of fascism. Populism and neoliberalism do not enable meaningful political decision making by citizens. Nonetheless, they are part of the democratic spectrum, and especially after 1989 they have been causally connected and have often succeeded each another. Introduction / 5 On a global scale, populism is not a pathology of democracy but a political form that thrives in democracies that are particularly unequal, that is, in places where the income gap has increased and the legitimacy of democratic representation has decreased. As a response, populism is capable of undermining democracy even more without breaking it, and if and when it does extin- guish democracy, it ceases to be populism and becomes something else: dictatorship. Historically, the populist responses to these contexts (right or left) are distinctive and have been framed within varying national situations and political cultures, but they generally go in the direction of authoritarianism. This is mainly because populism, like fascism before it, understands its own position as the only and true form of political legitimacy. The single truth of populism is that the leader and the nation make up a whole. For populism, the singular will of the majority cannot accept other points of view. In this regard, populism is like fascism in being a response to liberal and socialist explanations of the political. And also like fascism, populism does not recognize a legitimate political place for an opposition that it regards as acting against the desires of the people and that it also accuses of being tyrannical, conspiratorial, and antidemocratic. But this refusal to recognize the opposition’s legitimacy does not generally go beyond the logic of discursive demonization. The opponents are turned into public enemies but only rhetorically. If populism moves from this rhetorical enmity to practices of enemy identifi cation and persecution, we could be talking about its transformation into fascism or another form of dictatorial repression. This has happened in the past, for example, in the case of the Peronist Triple A during the beginning of Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s, and without question it could happen in the future. This morphing of populism back into 6 / Introduction fascism is always a possibility, but it is very uncommon, and when it does happen, and populism becomes fully antidemocratic, it is no longer populism. While fascism celebrates dictatorship, populism never does so. Fascism idealizes and practices raw forms of political violence that populism rejects in theory and, most often, in practice. Talking about populism and fascism as though they are the same is thus problematic, as the two are signifi cantly dif- ferent. Populism is a form of authoritarian democracy, while fascism is an ultraviolent dictatorship. The terms are genealogically but usually not conceptually or contextually connected. Properly historicized, populism is not fascism. Why then are populism and fascism used without reference to their histories? Are we really witnessing the return of fascism, the ism that marked the fi rst half of the twentieth century with steel and blood? Generally, fascism is not approached as a spe- cifi c historical experience that had very traumatic outcomes but is, rather, considered an insult. Thus, populist parties and leaders that generally represent authoritarian understandings of democracy, but ultimately are not against it, are wrongly equated with fascist dictatorial formations. After 1945, for the fi rst time in its history, populism fi nally morphed from an ideology and a style of protest movements to a power regime.

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